Goal 1 achieved, two week manned spaceflight, move on to goal 2, docking.

They turned around their iterations quickly in manageable chunks, with the first 4 missions going from 4 hours to 4 days, to 8 days, to 14 days. Gemini had 10 manned space missions in about 18 months. I can't imagine the rocket scientists saying, 'we didn't bother testing the space suit systems properly, because this isn't a production mission to the moon, it's just a proof of concept.' The astronauts were going out into the vacuum of space, so everything had to work with quality. Not NASA, they built real rockets, with real spacecraft on top, put real people into them and conducted real work that went into production. Only to find out a month later when the real work starts that most of what they learned was invalid, and that reference architecture we built was a bit Mickey Mouse. The team gets to have a whale of a time playing with code that 'we don't need to QA because it will never go into production' with the aim of getting learning of how to do real work. How often have you come across IT projects that are in a 'proof of concept' phase that deliver no real working value. They got the Validated Learning by delivering real missions. So what did they get from Gemini? They got: In a very agile way in 1964, NASA worked out that the original goal to land on land was not needed after all, so the mission was brought to a close early. To perfect methods of entering the atmosphere and landing at a preselected point on land.Īll of these were the perceived steps needed to prove that a mission to the moon was possible.To rendezvous and dock with orbiting vehicles and to maneuver the docked combination by using the target vehicle's propulsion system.

To subject man and equipment to space flight up to two weeks in duration.

Mercury was all about getting manned spaceflight, Gemini was what NASA called 'a bridge to the moon' - to work out how Apollo could be achieved, and Apollo was about getting to the moon.

As I mentioned in my last post, they had a backlog, and took achievable chunks from it, and finished them before moving on to the next. Well, I've had a good think about it, and this is another aspect of I find admirable about NASA's approach. What on earth were the other 10 missions costing millions of dollars for then? Here's a daft question, which mission first landed humans on the moon? Apollo 11 of course, but lets think about that.

Dan brown nasa